Big Data = Big Problems

Big data has gone beyond a buzzword for businesses and is rapidly becoming embedded in the way organisations operate and make decisions. Highlighted as one of the key areas for attention in the latest ISF Threat Horizon 2016 report, Big data analytics can also mislead when decisions are based on faulty, skewed, incomplete or poorly analysed data sets, resulting in missed opportunities as organisations enter the wrong markets, or enter the right markets with the wrong products. It’s also possible that the same data sets can lead to different conclusions in different parts of the world as a result of cultural bias. Further complicating matters, attackers will target data analytics tools to ensure decisions are skewed.

This webcast will look at the implied threats to Big Data and offer ways of communicating the challenge of effective Big Data analysis and decision making to senior management.

The concept of Data lakes evolved to address challenges and opportunities in managing big data.

Organizations are investing massive amounts of time and money to upgrade existing data infrastructures and build data lakes whether on-premises or in the cloud.

This talk will discuss architectures and design options to implement data lakes with open source tools. Also covered are challenges of upgrade & migration from existing data warehouses, metadata management, supporting self-service and managing production deployments.

The Web is the most powerful communication medium and the largest public data repository that humankind has created. Its content ranges from great reference sources such as Wikipedia to ugly fake news. Indeed, social (digital) media is just an amplifying mirror of ourselves. Hence, the main challenge of search engines and other websites that rely on web data is to assess the quality of such data. However, as all people have their own biases, web content, as well as our web interactions, are tainted with many biases.

Data bias includes redundancy and spam, while interaction bias includes activity and presentation bias. In addition, sometimes algorithms add bias, particularly in the context of search and recommendation systems. As bias generates bias, we stress the importance of de-biasing data as well as using the context and other techniques such as explore & exploit, to break the filter bubble.

The main goal of this talk is to make people aware of the different biases that affect all of us on the Web. Awareness is the first step to be able to fight and reduce the vicious cycle of bias.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates areas of expertise are web search and data mining, information retrieval, data science, and algorithms. He is CTO of NTENT, a semantic search technology company based in California, USA since 2016. Before, he was VP of Research at Yahoo Labs, based first in Barcelona, Spain, and later in Sunnyvale, California, from January 2006 to February 2016. He also is part time Professor at DTIC of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona, Spain, as well as at DCC of Universidad de Chile in Santiago.

Perhaps one of the buzziest of buzzwords for the past few years has been "Blockchain". But for those who are well-versed in the technology and the goings on of the industry, it is definitely more than just hype.

Join this session where a panel of experienced Blockchain specialists will discuss:

-Viability of Use Cases - Just because a centralized database can be more efficient doesn't mean it's the most viable

-Preventing Blockchain from Being Just a Trend - if blockchain isn't viable as the solution, it shouldn't be used

-Public vs Private Blockchain Use

-State of the Industry - Understanding that a lot of the platforms and frameworks are in their early stage of development and that support may not be readily available

David Siegel, Blockchain, decentralization and business agility expert

Still confused about this whole Blockchain thing? Interested in investing in digital currencies, but not sure where to start? Want to get a better idea of the threats and opportunities?

David Siegel is a Blockchain, decentralization and business agility expert who has been a high-level management & strategy consultant to companies like Sony, Hewlett Packard, Amazon, NASA, Intel, and many start-ups. David has been praised for being able to explain Blockchain in the most simple and interesting way.

What you will learn:
-What is Bitcoin?
-What is the blockchain?
-What is Ethereum? What is Ether?
-What is a distributed application?
-What is a smart contract?
-What is a triple ledger?
-What about identity and security?
-What business models are at risk?
-What are the opportunities?
-What should we do?

Today the payments industry faces a rebirth by necessity. Financial institutions process massive volumes of customer and payments transaction data, much of it unstructured and untapped.

Cognitive Systems have the ability to understand, reason and learn. In Financial Services applying cognitive capabilities to real world payments issues like safer and faster payments is yielding significant results. Furthermore Risk and Compliance and segment of one engagement are areas where ROI is tremendous when leveraging advanced analytics and artificial intelligence in cohesion.

Learn from real world use cases of how financial institutions globally have gained significant competitive advantage by becoming a truly Cognitive Bank.

Learn about analyzing and visualizing big data in Tableau. Hear tips & tricks, see examples and ask your burning questions during this live webinar.

We will give you a live demo on how to connect Tableau to Exasol's dataviz environment where you can explore large public datasets.

We'll show you how to tackle these data sets when starting your analysis and take you through some example visualizations to inspire your own work.

We'll be working with data in Exasol for the following week's Makeover Monday challenge, so use this opportunity to ask us any questions you have ahead of time so you can make the most out of playing with big data.

Data visualization must be intuitive in order for non-IT business leaders to see data patterns. Representing data in a graphical or pictorial format is easy, but constructing the data in the best and most logical way can be tricky.

In this session, Umesh will talk about how to represent data simply to make quicker and better business decisions. He will walk through several data visualization techniques through business cases and examples. By the end of the session, you will not only know different data visualization techniques, but also have an understanding of circumstances under which each technique should be used and the best way to represent particular data sets for different business cases.

There has been a flood of publicity around big data, data processing, and the role of predictive analytics in businesses of the future.
As business operators how do we get access to these valuable business insights, even when there is not a data analyst around to walk us through their results?

- Should your software emulate a data scientist?
- Learn about the power of data visualizations.
- Learn about creating value from disperse data sets.

Predictive Analytics - everyone is talking about it and many organisations claim to be doing it. But are they? And what insights do they gain to then make tactical or strategic changes? How can analysts work with decision makers by sharing results in a visually effective and meaningful way while also informing them about possible courses of action?

This webinar is presented by Andy Kriebel, Head Coach at the Data School and Eva Murray, Tableau Evangelist at Exasol. Guest speakers on Predictive Analytics are Benedetta Tagliaferri, Consulting Analyst at The Information Lab and Matthew Reeve, Chief Data Wrangler at Exasol.

The webinar will look at some examples of predictive analysis and will show data visualization examples that are actionable and can drive further questions and discussions in an organisation.

Looking to take your graphs to the next level? Want to make sure you choose the right visualization? Plagued by the challenges of geospatial heat maps?

Get your questions ready and join this session where data experts Carl and Brett will go over the common questions they get asked and answer all the data visualization issues you've been plagued with, including how to:

-Use location-based data to put your visualization on the map
-Uncover new relationships, patterns and opportunities
-Identify emerging trends
-Answering comparative business questions with set analysis
-Understand best practices for creating an aesthetically-pleasing and useful visualization

When analysis needs to be used by decision makers that didn’t create it, the communication of the information and the message it conveys becomes critical. There is a plethora of ways to layout reports and dashboards, even within a single company.
Enter the SUCCESS formula, that “lightbulb” moment.

Introduced by the IBCS Association (International Business Communication Standards) the SUCCESS formula provides conceptual, perceptual and semantic rules that enable faster, better, and less-costly results in all stages of business communications and decision-making processes.

This webinar will introduce the 7 Rules of SUCCESS that provides a toolkit to aid analysts in designing their visualisations for better reach and decisions in their target audience.

The webinar will also introduce The Philips journey to implementing IBCS principles in their global "Accelerate!” Initiative.

Artificial intelligence has greatly changed the way we live since the 20th century. It involves the science and engineering of making machines intelligent and autonomous using computer programs.

The processing power of computers has been on the exponential increase with cost of processors and storage decreasing. This has made research and developments efforts in AI areas such as deep learning, once thought to be impossible possible.

In this webinar, we will examine current methods, application domains of specific methods, their impacts on our daily lives and try to answer questions on ethics of applying these technologies.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not a technology for the future; it’s a huge business opportunity for today. But how can your organisation become a trailblazer for AI innovation, transforming the way you work to deliver immediate – and lasting – bottom line value?

Former CERN scientist, Prof. Dr. Michael Feindt, is one of the brightest minds in Machine Learning. Join him for a 30-minute masterclass in how to apply AI to your business.

You’ll learn how AI can:
•Make sense of market and customer complexity, to deliver quick and effective decisions every single day
•Increase workforce productivity to improve output and staff morale
•Enhance decision-making and forecasting accuracy, for operational efficiency and improved productivity
•Be implemented into your business quickly, easily, with minimal disruption

Michael will also share real-life examples of how international businesses are using AI as a transformation tool, from his experience as founder of market-leading AI solution provider, Blue Yonder.

Today businesses of varying sizes, products and services, and industries are actively applying Predictive Business Analytics in seeking to improve greater customer engagement and resulting increased revenues and profits. Often these businesses are looking to their finance group to guide, if not lead, these efforts to successful outcomes.

In a recent article written by Ray Tong, he cited a CFO magazine survey that:
• Over 70% of respondents said that they plan to substantially increase the use of data analytics to support decision making and improve business partnering;
• 68% of respondents, the majority of who were finance executives, said that they plan to improve their data analytic skills in the coming year.

Consequently, it is essential that the financial professional understands what it is going to take for them to succeed.

This webinar discusses the five (5) keys to applying Predictive Business Analytics in your organization. It provides attendees with specific and practical insights to guide their approaches to develop and deploy an effective process that improves managerial decision making across many core performance and financial areas.

What you will learn:

• What are the key steps to success with practical examples
• What steps to avoid
• How to ensure and gain organizational impact

Larry Maisel a recognized author and thought leader in Business Analytics, with experience assisting companies to improve operating performance and business results. An accomplished business professional, with over 20+ years of experience, with proven leadership skills, expertise to drive bottom-line profits and implementing business systems.

Analytics risks can keep you up at night. What if…
· We make a big investment and don’t break even?
· Management doesn’t trust the results?
· Analysts cross data privacy boundaries?

What a dilemma! You see the perils, yet you want the rewards that analytics can bring. The appropriate process enables you to dramatically reduce risks and maximize returns on your data and analytics investment.

In this presentation, you will learn:
· What causes most analytics failures
· How you can diminish risk and maximize returns through strong analytics process
· Why you (yes, you!) have a pivotal opportunity to establish high standards for analytics process right now

Humans have been protecting our complex network infrastructures for decades with varying degrees of success, while eusocial insects such as ants are capable of withstanding countless attacks on their networks.

This presentation is about what ants in general and Leafcutter Ants in particular approach security and how we can learn from these survivors of millions years of warfare.

You will learn:
-How social insects (ants) are dealing with predictive analysis
-Applying the defense mechanism of ants on threat intelligence
-How information sharing and communication can lead to better security
-Data and Identity Management

This case study is framed in a multinational company with 300k+ employees, present in 100+ countries, that is adding one extra layer of security based on big data analytics capabilities, in order to provide net-new value to their ongoing SOC-related investments.

Having billions of events being generated on a weekly basis, real-time monitoring must be complemented with deep analysis to hunt targeted and advanced attacks.

By leveraging a cloud-based Spark cluster, ElasticSearch, R, Scala and PowerBI, a security analytics platform based on anomaly detection is being progressively implemented.

In an increasingly digitalised world, the value of information grows ever higher. Winning organisations – whether in financial services or any other vertical sector – will be those who can harness the power of data analytics to develop microscopic levels of insight and foresight into customer behaviours and operational activities in order to make progressive improvements on a continuous basis. Product development informed by factual evidence rather than educated guesswork, or real-time risk management based on a hyper-accurate picture of exposures, bring significant internal and external benefits.

However, while banks want to get closer to their customers, is the feeling mutual? Data privacy is a very sensitive issue, and the perception of what constitutes intrusion will likely vary between individuals. Institutions, therefore, need to walk a fine line between what’s genuinely useful and what’s genuinely creepy.

During this webinar, a panel of respected subject matter experts will discuss and dissect the key issues related to the widespread use of data analytics in financial services, identifying the obstacles which need to be overcome and the enablers that will drive FS forward successfully.

Data is the foundation of any organization and therefore, it is paramount that it is managed and maintained as a valuable resource.

Subscribe to this channel to learn best practices and emerging trends in a variety of topics including data governance, analysis, quality management, warehousing, business intelligence, ERP, CRM, big data and more.